Forensic Files - Season 12, Episode 26 - About Face - Full Episode | Forensic Files

up next a human skeleton is found in the marshlands of north carolina the longer
a body's been dead the harder it is to determine how long it's been dead we don't know who she is we don't know why
she was killed but it tells a story all its own whatever happened to pre-sea death it
probably was sexual a story of anger and hatred at what point does a person realize that you know they're dying and
a violent end had this person remained anonymous we would have had nowhere to go
[Music] [Music] on a cold spring afternoon in 2004 rayleigh jacobs found what looked like
human bones in the backyard of the home he rented in wilmington north carolina it was kind of gruesome we came across
these bones it was horrible first we seen her leg bones and then we came across her skull you know and ribs and
you know then we realized you know it wasn't fake it was real you know so it was was terrible
he called authorities who moved quickly to collect the remains and any possible forensic evidence
the bones that had been scattered by the animals and maybe about a tide coming in
because that was a marshland it was a dump site and there's a lot of garbage back there
anthropologist dr midori albert and her team of student volunteers recovered about 160 bones
or 80 of the skeleton [Music] the victim was a caucasian female about 30 years old and from the length of her
femur about five foot four inches tall the amount of decomposition indicated she'd been dead for approximately 18
months and it was clear the woman died violently when i see injuries that were as
extensive as this particular case i'm sort of perplexed by what the individual what the victim was going
through while sustaining these injuries and how long death might have occurred the woman had a broken nose broken ribs
and had been stabbed with a sharp object numerous times in the lower abdomen it indicated to me somebody who might
have been stabbing or mutilating this individual stabbed 50 times at what point do you just not feel any more stab
wounds the lack of clothing found near the remains was also telling the nudity would indicate
a certain behavior pattern they would indicate that whatever happened to precede their death
it probably was sexual fennel believed it was a clear sign of rage and a possible indication the killer
knew the victim he also believed the killer was familiar with the area someone knew that they could get back
there and hide this body there without being seen while they were hiding the body
because ray jacobs had lived in the rental home only a short time he wasn't considered a suspect in the homicide
whoever put the bones there or done this you know i was afraid that they would probably come back or
you know show up unexpectedly and you know so i didn't really know what to think at the time after that
the first order of business was to identify the victim a task that wouldn't be easy
according to the doe network an organization that tracks the number of unknown victims there were 100 other
cases involving unidentified victims in north carolina alone investigators hoped that forensic
anthropology could narrow the search obviously in order to do any kind of investigation you have to start with
figuring out who this person is the victim found in the north carolina marsh had suffered a violent death
she was beaten stabbed and her nude body left in the marsh in the cold of winter
but who was this person her remains were laid out in the lab and she was somebody i saw every day every
day i go in the lab and turn the lights on and work on another case or we hold a
class in there i would look over at her and often wonder how long it was going to take to get any kind of confirmation
investigators had a theory that the killer was local it had to be someone who had some
familiarity with that particular plot of land and if the killer was local the victim
might be as well so investigators searched missing persons reports for caucasian females
living in a 50 mile radius who disappeared in the last 18 months this yielded a number of possibilities
but the closest match was 31 year old scarlett wood she was unmarried and living at home so
she could care for her mother who was suffering from liver cancer on the night she disappeared she told
her mother she was going to a party with friends it was in january it was cold and um i woke up at the
funniest feeling you know you have a superstition and i said scroll i got a bad feeling
something's gonna happen i said you just stay here tonight she said no i'll be all right
but scarlett never returned she was always good about checking in with them saying where she was going to
be if she wasn't going to be home at a certain time investigators hope to compare scarlett's
dental records with the unknown victim but their attempt was unsuccessful she had dental records but they were 10
years old and i couldn't find any dentists that kept their records that long and initially
scientists couldn't use dna testing either they couldn't pull the dna from the remains from the bones
apparently the bones are too dried out investigators were facing the very real possibility that their victim would
never be identified then forensic anthropologist dr midori albert had an idea i've been familiar with a procedure
called skull photo video superposition where you take an actual skull and you can take a photograph of a person and
actually blend the two images together and what we tend to do with that is we look for different anatomical landmarks
and points of similarity unfortunately the university of north carolina didn't have the facilities to perform this
procedure the hardware and software can cost as much as thirty five thousand dollars
so dr albert did the next best thing she asked one of her colleagues to improvise
i went to shane baptista on campus who is a computer guru and is very familiar with open source software which is
software that is available to anybody as a free download baptista found a free program called
[ __ ] or gnu image manipulation program [ __ ] is an unfortunate acronym pretty
much feature for feature and equivalent of adobe photoshop to see if it worked he performed a
forensic test on himself i sat myself down and set up a web camera on a computer and
took some photographs of myself at what i tried to get to be the same orientation
he superimposed his photo over a plastic skull he separated both images into quadrants
and looked for consistencies in the images as he expected there were none i was able to get a creepy image that
showed that that wasn't my skull which we pretty much knew baptista moved on to the ultimate test
pictures of scarlet wood were superimposed over the skull of the murder victim the similarities were immediately
apparent when i started messing around with the scarlet woods it kind of lined up pretty
quickly and so it was the ease of the fit got me pretty confident at the outset that we were on the right
track it's never 100 conclusive but it was fantastic because a lot of the anatomical landmarks were
very consistent it seemed possible that the victim was scarlet wood although investigators still weren't 100
certain but at least they had somewhere to start [Music] with the skeleton found on private
property investigators first turned to the property owner and the residents as potential suspects
investigators learned that there were two tenants living on the property at the time of the murder both men in their
mid to late 20s they both had some histories with the law enforcement of questionable
character the landlord told police the men moved out a year and a half earlier which would have been around the time of
the murder they have left in a hurry leaving behind furniture clothing there was some
women's clothing left in the house some underwear that kind of thing hoping for answers
police found one of the men in hampstead north carolina 28 miles away and brought
him in for questioning everything did you guys have parties after the house what kind of road
that's got anything to hide well the man said he knew nothing about the murder and never met scarlett wood
he said he and his roommate weren't getting along and they moved out of the rental property after living there only
a few months just roommates breaking up money issues police weren't so sure and sent a forensic team to search the
house all of the floors walls and ceilings were sprayed with luminol but they showed no signs of blood
after interviewing the tenants and the previous tenants we were pretty much at a standstill
next investigators interviewed all of scarletwood's friends and her best friend lynne bollinger said
she knew where scarlett was headed on the night she went missing she said scarlett spent every friday
night at a local motel where there was usually a party they were at a motel partying drinking
drinking beer and just having a good time i believe it was scarlet and three out of three or four other people
police interviewed several individuals who attended that party they said everyone left around 2am
except scarlett and a friend of hers 47 year old john wayne boyer [Music] boyer is a
truck driver he actually worked at a different couple of different locations here in wilmington
boyer no longer lived in the area he had been interviewed by police after scarlett disappeared
they were partying and drinking scotland wanted to leave and he said he didn't want to leave and
she left boyer said she left around 3 a.m on foot at the time no one really believed boyer's story
that scarlett would have walked home seven miles away in freezing cold temperatures
she was not equipped for the cold it was about 17 degrees at night i believe she
had on just a pair of jeans and with a light coat but john boyer had no criminal history
and he and scarlett were acquaintances she used to babysit his ex-girlfriend's children so we had a personal
relationship with her scarlett's friends however despised him my father had his own trucking business
so we we knew about this man he was really big he drank a lot and he just he acted he acted fine but i just
there's something about him i just didn't like i didn't trust investigators were able to locate the
minivan boyer owned at the time of scarlet's disappearance we ended up finding that van and doing a
search on it and we had to find nothing in it they also searched the hotel room where
the party took place the room was examined for blood we used the luminol to determine if there was
blood unfortunately they had redecorated that particular hotel room so some of the furniture was new but there was no
evidence found of any kind of bodily fluids or blood or anything like that unsolicited
a psychic called suggesting scarlett's body was dumped in an industrial area about a block away from
the hotel myself and my partner at the time went out to the scene when i looked around
kicked the bushes that kind of thing didn't locate anything again investigators were at a standstill
they had no dna proof that the skeleton was scarlet wood they had no blood evidence to prove that there had been
violence in the hotel room or in john boyer's van in fact they had no evidence at all
[Music] using a technique called facial photo superimposition a forensic anthropologist made a
preliminary finding that the unidentified skeleton was 31 year old scarlet wood but this wasn't an identification that
would hold up in court investigators had sent the remains to an outside forensic laboratory hoping to
get a dna profile but for reasons no one can quite understand the lab was unsuccessful
[Music] we would never know for sure who our victim was without the dna i'm not sure what that
is but they just couldn't pull the dna from the bones so they just advised us like almost a
year and a half later that just couldn't do it just couldn't find dna nothing seemed to be coming of the
analysis and after the first year passed we were we were quite disturbed and very upset
about it undeterred investigators sent the skeleton for a forensic second opinion to a private
laboratory this one in pennsylvania there scientists tried drilling into a tooth
and found just enough tooth pulp to generate a dna profile within three weeks they came back with a
positive identification and with more digging sergeant john leonard discovered that
scarlet wood had surgery performed on her finger just before she disappeared and
that a biopsy was performed by law i guess medically they had to keep these things for seven years i was
told i spoke to a doctor who did the operation on her and he advised me that that i could you know go to go to the
place that stored this this uh this biopsy and i was able to get it incredibly dna testing of that biopsy sample
matched the dna profile from the victim's tooth it was the best news i'd heard in a long
time it's a long-awaited conclusion to a mystery and a very tragic death when the
dna came back and it confirmed that my victim was scarlet wood and that john boyle was the last person to be seen
with her we ended up going to augusta georgia and interviewing john boyer at first
boyer repeated what he told investigators several years earlier that scarlett grew impatient waiting for
him to give her a ride she decided to walk home instead and left the motel room around 3 a.m
sergeant leonard didn't believe it i've been talking to you since 10 o'clock this morning all we've heard is
live okay john because i have a body i have a body now okay so i'm gonna be able to tell if he lied to me right okay
and with that his story changed that's when he told me he wanted to have sex she said okay but he couldn't perform
we had a little sex a little bit we tried to she got pissed off because i couldn't keep it up with her and she
told me oh you you're just an old old man she was belittling him about him not be
able to have perform they end up pushing her he wasn't bleeding i know that she wasn't bleeding no she was not
bleeding after you pushed her and she hit the nightstand yeah yeah boyer said scarlett hit her head
accidentally against the nightstand but dr midori albert believes it's more likely her head was pushed into the
table forcibly prosecutors also believe boyer broke her ribs since it was late boyer was able to carry scarlett's body
outside to his truck without attracting notice [Music] he then took her to the marshy field
near the trucking company where he worked the evidence shows he used some sort of
sharp object and repeatedly stabbed her going so far as to mutilate her and then
he left her there i learned a lot from her skeleton and i believe in death she made significant
contributions some of the information boyer gave police in his so-called confession
was corroborated by the evidence and i got scared and i picked her up on my shoulder and
put in the truck took me down there in the woods okay now do you understand that that that that's a really different
that's a little bit different story than what you told us 10 minutes ago and a big different story than what you told
us three hours ago but not everything he said was true he wasn't bleeding i know that
she wasn't bleeding no you were not bleeding in april of 2007 john boyer pled guilty to a charge of
second-degree murder and was sentenced to 12 years in prison scarlett's family still have problems accepting the
enormity of the crime he never gave her true stories as to what really happened so i don't guess we'll ever really know
i still don't think miss woods has got it in her mind her daughter's not coming home investigators also suspect
boyer was involved in the murder of 26 year old rose marie mallett which took place about a year before scarlett wood
was murdered when he saw the photo he stopped everything and said i know her she's a prostitute i've had sex with
her i want an attorney so based on based on that we're on that um that utterance um he's a suspect in this
homicide also but john boyer is now behind bars because simple technology available to
anyone identified the victim of his crime without the initial understanding that
we were dealing with a female of european descent of an adult age the investigators wouldn't have known how to
target that group of missing people and certainly without the trauma being evidenced on the bone such that it was
i'm not sure that there would have been a conviction we'd never known that was her
if it wasn't for forensic evidence we've never known i'm glad we got this guy i was really
still am honored to have been a part of the process and pleased with how the system can stay
with it to to help this unidentified person gain some justice to give the family
some peace and to take this bad guy off the streets so that you know he's not able to do it
again you

A human skeleton was discovered in the North Carolina marshlands and, when investigators learned she'd been dead for 18 months, they knew it would be difficult to find out who she was, much less who killed her.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

A skeleton found in North Carolina is identified as Scarlett Wood, leading to the conviction of John Boyer for her murder.

Key points

Human Skeleton Found in North Carolina. A gruesome discovery reveals a body in the marshlands, leading to a chilling investigation.
Scarlett Wood's Disappearance. Scarlett Wood, a 31-year-old woman, goes missing after a night out with friends.
DNA Testing Leads to Identification. Forensic scientists finally identify the victim as Scarlett Wood after a long struggle.
John Boyer's Confession. John Boyer changes his story after being confronted with evidence linking him to the crime.
Justice for Scarlett Wood. John Boyer pleads guilty to second-degree murder, bringing some closure to the case.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

We don’t know who she is, we don’t know why she was killed.

0:14WatchJan 28, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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